The EU has recently funded a significant number of new projects to continue to drive forward Europe’s readiness for the transition to exascale computing. As a result EPCC will add another three projects to its portfolio of exascale activities.

The INTERTWinE project has spent a lot of effort addressing interoperability challenges raised by task-based models. By rethinking parallelism in the paradigm of tasks, one reduces synchronisation and decouples the management of parallelism from computation.

This is really attractive but existing models typically rely on shared memory, where the programmer expresses input and output dependencies of tasks based upon variables, which in turn limits the technology to a single memory space – often a node of an HPC machine. So to then scale up beyond a single memory space we must combine a task model with distributed memory technology, such as MPI or GASPI, and this has been a focus for a number of activities in INTERTWinE.

Here at EPCC we are looking forward to the 5th Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC 2018), which will be held here in Edinburgh in a couple of weeks. This will be the third time we have hosted EASC and it is always a great opportunity to hear about the cutting edge of HPC research.

EPCC is offering two fully-funded PhD studentships working in collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and ARM. We are seeking highly talented and motivated graduates to apply for the studentships, beginning in early 2018.

We are developing a prototype platform that utilises the latest developments in memory technology, and that will offer vastly improved I/O performance compared to current HPC machines. The system will be developed end-to-end by the project partners – from inception through to delivery, with a full suite of systemware that can make use of the new technologies.